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Harold Hart Crane was born at this site on July 21, 1899, to Grace Hart Crane and Clarence A. Crane, the inventor of Lifesaver Candies, and lived here until the age of three. “A born poet,” according to e.e. cummings, Crane dropped out of high school in 1916 and moved from Cleveland to New York City to focus on a literary career. Mainly self-educated, Crane drew his influence from the writings of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His major work, The Bridge (1930), uses the Brooklyn Bridge as the perfect metaphor to celebrate contemporary urban life. Uniquely lyrical in structure and full of imagery, it is considered one of the three major poetic sequences of the first half of the twentieth century along with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Crane died on April 26, 1932.
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In the years leading to Ohio statehood in 1803, Ames Township citizens decided to establish a stock-owned circulating library. Since cash was scarce during Ohio’s frontier era, some citizens paid for their $2.50 shares by the sale of animal pelts, which were taken to Boston for sale in the spring of 1804 by merchant Samuel Brown. There he acquired fifty-one volumes, primarily books on history, religion, travel, and biography, as the first accessions for the Western Library Association. Senator Thomas Ewing later related that he paid his share with ten raccoon skins, thus suggesting the collection’s popular name “the Coonskin Library.” Judge Ephraim Cutler was the first of many librarians who kept the library until 1861.
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In 1927, Henry Abell, a master plumber, purchased a 100-acre dairy farm. When the Great Depression struck the nation two years later, Abell could find little work as a plumber and decided to develop his dairy farm. In 1934, he and his family began the Dairy, growing the farm to 500 acres and producing enough milk, ice cream, and other dairy products to supply five counties. The dairy closed in 1979, but today houses America’s Ice Cream and Dairy Museum, dedicated to the cultural history of the ice cream and dairy industry in Ohio and the United States.
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Monroe County’s rugged terrain hindered commerce and communication during the 1800s. In the early 1870s Woodsfield businessmen, led by banker Samuel L. Mooney, promoted a narrow-gauge railroad to connect to the Baltimore and Ohio at Bellaire. Narrow gauge railroads were popular during this boom era because they cost less to build and operate than standard-gauge lines and could traverse sharp curves and steep terrain. The Bellaire and Southwestern Railway was completed through Armstrong’s Mills and Beallsville to Woodsfield in December 1879, giving Monroe County a welcome modern link to the rest of the country. Its initial success prompted its extension westward, and it was soon renamed the Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati Railway, reaching Zanesville via Caldwell in late 1883.
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Born in Homer in 1838, Victoria Claflin proved to be a woman with visions that exceeded her time. Victoria and her sister Tennessee, in 1870, became the first women stockbrokers in the country. Her opinions expressed in the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly newspaper led her to become the first woman invited to address Congress.
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Construction of Waverly’s third church, built with locally produced brick, began in 1859 and was completed in 1860. The original deed, recorded on October 31, 1859, listed the value of the lot as $180. With the merger of the Evangelical Synod of North America with the Reformed Church in 1934, the name changed to Evangelical and Reformed Church. A merger in 1957 with the Congregational Christian Church changed the name to First United Church of Christ. In 1987 it became known as Waverly United Church of Christ, until its dissolution in 1992, when the building was given to Pike Heritage Foundation Museum. Original records and services were in German. In 1890 some English was introduced in services, and by the early 1900s was used on alternate Sundays. The church was remodeled and enlarged in 1869, but retains much of its original appearance. An annex was added to the church in 1959.
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Moncure Daniel Conway was born on March 17, 1832 in Stafford County, Virginia, the son of Walker Peyton and Margaret Daniel Conway. His father was a wealthy slaveholder and prominent state legislator and county court justice official while his mother, who opposed slavery, introduced her son to abolitionism. Conway graduated from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1849 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1854. Despite his southern aristocratic background, Conway, influenced by his mentor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, strongly opposed slavery and eventually religious orthodoxy. Much of Conway’s career was spent abroad, where he became a writer and scholar, writing such notable biographies as Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890), and Life of Thomas Paine (1892).
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Due to what is known as the Sharon Conglomerate or pebbly sandstone, these ledges have played an important role in the daily life of local residents and the economy. The porousness of this rock, which underlies much of Geauga County, supplies most of the county’s drinking water. Thompson Ledges also provided building stone with stone cutters working in quarries turning out doorsteps, watering troughs, gateposts, culverts, and bridges from mid-1800 to 1911 for use in Thompson, Geauga County and occasionally beyond. After 1900, cement became the preferred building material, but still used silica pebbles from the Ledges for gravel and cement. The Ledges have an unusual ecosystem containing several distinctive forests. A chestnut oak forest is pervasive on the top while a northern hemlock forest exists in the exposed creaks and crevices of the upper rim and ledges.
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